Is it reincarnation or memory error?

May 01, 2007, 03.51 AM IST

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The ad shows a roly-poly Sikh kid running out of a bus with his astonished parents hot on his heels. They enter an ancient home where the boy greets an old woman by her first name in Tamil. Almost swooning in shock, she in turn greets him back as the reincarnation of her dead husband.

Of course, it’s only an ad for a product that’s touted to be so everlasting that it defies death and decay across incarnations. At a deeper psychological level, the casting of a young Sardar as an avatar of a doddering Tamilian is also meant to appeal to the widespread belief in reincarnation on the Indian subcontinent.

To the votaries of incarnation, there is really no logic in such a lottery: A fat old banker may well have been a sensuous Egyptian dancer in his past life and a dog grovelling at your feet might be the reincarnation of the mean martinet who made lives of his students hell as headmaster. That does not, however, endorse the phenomenon of ‘old lives in new bottles’.

Far from it! Indeed, recent research says belief in reincarnation could be linked to a error in processing of memories (This is exactly the conclusion of PsychoBabble’s own brush with hyponotic regression!)

The scientists led by Maarten Peters at the department of experimental psychology at Maastrict University in the Netherlands, have linked it to a seemingly innate propensity to make implausible claims. Most cases of false memories prove to be so difficult to whet precisely because the false memory effectively overwrites the “ground truth”. So much so that the respondent ends up wholeheartedly believing his or her own confabulations.

Since the truth or falsity of such memories cannot be established objectively, the scientists chose an experimental group on the basis of a particularly implausible-sounding claim — the group consisting of 11 women and two men all claimed to have vivid recollections from a previous life. However, the Dutch researchers found that people who claim to have lived past lives were more prone to making memory errors than the control group, who had no belief in reincarnation.

The participants were asked to read aloud a list of 40 ‘non-famous’ names. Two hours later, they were given another list and were asked to indicate if the names were famous. The experimental group was found to be twice as likely than the control group to attribute fame falsely to the names they had been exposed to. The scientists call it an example of ‘source monitoring error’.

When source monitoring is impaired, one has difficulty attributing where and how information was acquired, but the origins of unreliable pieces of information are unquestioned nevertheless, and the unreliable information is seamlessly woven into a seemingly real memory.

Earlier research has shown how easily such memories can be ‘planted’, either during hypnosis, therapy or brainwashing. As to what makes such people more prone to committing such errors in the first place, experts said it could be the byproduct of a particularly vivid imaginative faculty: the saving grace is that such people tend respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

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